Peach (65 page)

Pulling himself on to the worn scrubbed steps, Noel lifted his head and stared at the gleaming brass bellpull. The light above the door dazzled him as he forced himself on to his knees, scrabbling upwards to reach the bell … What was the sign by the bell there …? Did it say
MADDOX CHARITY ORPHANAGE
? The cold steel letters were cutting through his brain, tearing at him in a white heat of pain. Had he come home again?

Noel sank back on to the steps fighting the pain. If he was weak and let it control him it would take him away … away from the gleaming brass doorbell, away from the light.
Away from Peach for ever
. He would be back at the beginning—alone. Noel’s cry of pure anger shattered the silence of the cold dark night.

The ringing of the telephone woke Peach and she stared blurrily at the silver clock on the bedside table. It said five o’clock! The phone shrilled again and she picked it up hastily. “Yes?” she asked.

“Madame Maddox?”

“Yes, this is she.”

“Forgive me for calling so early, Madame, but I’m afraid
I have some unfortunate news for you. My name is Dr Etienne Chapelle. Your husband, Monsieur Noel Maddox, has been involved in an accident and is here, in the hospital at Aix-en-Provence.”

Peach snapped awake, staring in front of her at the white wall and the statue of Sekhmet. “You must be wrong,” she said bewildered. “Noel is in Detroit, I know he is. This must be someone else.”

“Madame, there is no mistake. Your husband was struck by a car when he was crossing the street. I’m sorry to tell you, Madame Maddox, but he is badly injured. It would be better if you came here right away.”

Peach stared uncomprehendingly at the receiver, hearing his words but not wanting to believe them.

“Madame? Madame, are you there?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m here.”

“I’m sorry this has been such a shock, but there is no other way to break this kind of news. Can we expect you at the hospital then, Madame?”

“Yes,” said Peach. “Yes. Of course.”

The telephone receiver purred gently as she dropped it on to the bed, pushing back the covers in a flurry of panic. The walls seemed to be closing in on her and she was stifling, choking with fear. She flung open the shutters, gasping great gulps of cold dawn air. Oh God,
Noel! Noel! It can’t be true
, it
must
be some other man. Noel was safe in Detroit, dreaming up new schemes for Great Lakes Motors’s future. She had planned to telephone him today. But the doctor had known who he was. He knew to call her! Then it must be Noel. Oh God! Why? Why him?

The cold grey mist rolled back in swirls of pink and oyster and gold as the first hint of sun touched the horizon. Peach thought of her son, waking to another pleasant normal day, and the new child yet to be born. Only now Noel might
never come home … Burying her face in her hands she moaned in terror.
“Noel, Noel, don’t die! You can’t die! Please, oh please!”
She must get dressed, she must go to him right away.

She stared around their bedroom in panic—the room where they’d shared their love—and their anger. The room that had been Leonie’s. She understood now why she had never changed it. The big white bed and the simple furnishings were all it needed. Its walls were papered with memories and Leonie’s statues were its decoration.

“Oh Grand-mère,” she wailed staring at the Sekhmet statue despairingly, “Grand-mère!”

The sun’s first strong rays stole across the room, tipping the proud lion’s head with gold and painting burnished gilt shadows across its face. The sunlit statue stared back at her with Leonie’s commanding tawny eyes and Peach gazed at it transfixed. Then she ran towards it holding out her hand. “Grand-mère,” she called, “Grand-mère, help us, please help us!” Gripping the statue’s hand for a moment she thought it felt warm—warm as her own, and then the sun’s rays shifted and Sekhmet’s eyes were just blank impersonal stone and the hand only cool carved granite in hers.

The drive to Aix seemed interminable and watching the minutes ticking by on the dashboard clock Peach imagined them ticking away Noel’s life. Desperately she pressed her foot harder on the accelerator, speeding through quiet earlymorning country towns and villages until at last she was there.

Noel lay in a narrow hospital bed, his head shaved and bandaged. Both his legs were in traction and his right shoulder in plaster and rows and rows of large neat stitches daubed with a bright pink sterile solution criss-crossed his naked chest and abdomen. A long tube fed him blood from a dark red bottle and wires linked him to cold steel machines
that blinked and bleeped, marking the beating of his heart and the processes of his brain.

The flesh seemed to have melted from Noel’s face and his bones jutted sharply, making him look young and vulnerable. Stripped of his carefully invented facαde, Noel looked the way he had when she had first seen him that day at the orphanage.

Peach sat by his side, holding his hand in both hers, gazing into his face. “Noel,” she whispered urgently, “I don’t know if you care about me or not, but I want to tell you that
I love you
. You are my life, Noel. Don’t leave me now.
Think of the children, Noel
.” She stared anxiously at his impassive face. He couldn’t die, he just couldn’t. She wouldn’t let him die thinking he was unloved. “
Dammit, I love you, Noel Maddox
,” she cried, her tears falling on to his hands.

Watching Noel, she wondered if he would have asked her to come to him, if he even wanted her there? Yet he was near Aix when the accident happened. He’d been driving south—to her. Peach leaned back and closed her eyes. The image of Sekhmet filled her mind, staring at her with Leonie’s eyes. And she could hear Leonie reminding her again that love was all that mattered.
Noel had been coming to tell her he loved her. And Noel needed her strength now as well as her love
. Peach took Noel’s hand in hers, smiling.
She was surer now than she had been of anything in her life. Noel would be all right
.

The villa had a festive air. Its tiled roof sparkled under the early spring sunlight and mimosa trees in the gardens spilled fluffy bright balls of yellow. Indoors bowls and baskets and heavy crystal vases were massed with lilac and iris and fragile white narcissi, and bright spears of tulips opened wide like jungle flowers in the heat, displaying flamboyant scarlet petals with soft powdery yellow and black hearts. The long table in the dining room had been covered with a fine lace cloth and a cake iced in white with delicate pale pink roses waited, exact centre. Champagne cooled in silver buckets on the marble side-table and Leonie’s beautiful old Lalique glasses, treasured intact throughout the years, awaited the celebration.

The rattle of dishes and a smell of good things cooking came from the kitchen accompanied by cheerful chatter and snatches of song, and nearby two small, lithe, chocolate brown cats sprawled on the warm terrace, absorbing the sun with sensuous feline abandon.

The sea was blue and silken calm under a sky dotted with high puffed clouds and cicadas buzzed a familiar anthem, blending with the sound of church bells as the trail of cars wound its way up the hill towards the villa. Peach glanced at Noel, sitting beside her in the back of the old, chauffeurdriven dark blue de Courmont that had been Lais’s for so many years. She knew he was assessing its performance as it purred smoothly up the incline, and she smiled. Not even
his daughter’s christening could remove Noel’s thoughts completely from automobiles.

When he was finally on the mend, he’d said to her with a wry smile, “Ironic isn’t it? The thing I help create almost kills me?” Then tears had rolled down his face, not tears of self-pity, but, he told her, tears for the way he’d almost destroyed them. He’d been coming to tell her that what mattered was their love, their children, their lives. He had more than any man deserved—success, love and happiness, and now with his visit to the Maddox Charity Orphanage he’d finally realised that where he came from and whatever his past was, no longer mattered.

“It’s the present and our future,” he’d told her, his dark grey eyes pleading for understanding.

“And what about the chairmanship of Great Lakes Motors? I know you too well, Noel. Nothing can kill your ambition.”

“Ambition is part of me, it’s built-in, Peach … but now I know where to channel it. You’ll see, de Courmont will become the greatest automobile company in Europe—and one day our prestige cars will be the most sought-after on the American market. I can play my game from here, Peach—if you’ll put up with me?”

As the car turned off the dusty white lane into the courtyard the baby in her arms, cool in a simple white lawn dress edged with lace, yawned and stretched sleepily and Noel and Peach smiled at each other, remembering her strong yells of protest in the church. Peach waited while Noel manoeuvred his crutches and hauled himself from the car, disdaining any help. She knew he had set this special day—the christening of his three-month-old daughter—as the day on which he would be back on his feet. No more wheel chairs, no more anger when he feared his limbs would never obey him, no more signs of invalidism.

It was in his darkest moments of pain and despair that Peach, with a shamefaced smile, had brought out the old photograph of herself wearing the dreaded callipers. “I never told you before,” she’d whispered, “because I hated so much not being like everyone else that I isolated myself in my shame of those ugly steel bonds. And I thought if I told you you’d think of me as scarred and ugly … the way I thought of myself. But I beat it, Noel, and so will you … I know you will.”

He’d held her in his arms, disbelieving her foolishness. “Scars and all, I’d still have loved you,” he’d said, kissing her. And she thought that maybe her confession had helped him through the long days of operations to pin shattered bones, of traction and the grinding ache of physiotherapy. It would take more months of work, maybe even a year, but Noel would be his old self again. And her photograph, elegantly framed, now stood on the mantel alongside Noel’s boxing trophy—with its proud inscription, ’
NOEL MADDOX
, Junior Boxing Champion. Maddox Charity Orphanage, 1946.

Everyone was there for the christening. Wil, sixteen and looking very grown-up, keeping young Charles under control. Jim, Gerard and Amelie, Lais and Ferdi, Leonore—even Jean-Paul had come from Brazil, and Peach couldn’t help hoping that maybe this time Leonore and he might find more than friendship, they were so suited to each other. Friends and villagers crowded the terrace and the two cats perched arrogantly on the balustrade, looking like Egyptian sculptures.

It was, thought Noel, looking around as the champagne corks popped and glasses were filled, a true family celebration—and this time it was
his
family. There were no pangs of regret for that pinnacle of power in Detroit. He had his
priorities right. For him, at last, his family meant everything.

Peach lifted her glass in a toast, smiling tenderly at Noel, at her family, her friends. “To Leonie,” she said clearly.

“To Leonie,” they called, smiling at the new infant who opened her golden amber eyes wide in surprised response to her name.

But it was the other Leonie who was in their hearts too. Never to be forgotten.

The morning sunshine lightened the valley from green to gold as Mike Preston strode impatiently into the kitchen and flipped the switch on the coffee machine. To tell the truth, he was bored with the view of the Santa Ynez mountains; he was a man who needed the relentless pace and aggression of New York to spur him on—and yet it was to escape that same frantic life-style that he’d sought solitude in California.

Mike’s talent as an investigative journalist had earned him a Pulitzer prize, seven years ago, for his daring expose of corruption in high places. It was a snarled tale of armaments deals and contract payoffs that had eventually led to the dismissal, in disgrace, of a well-known general and Korean War hero, and the resignation of two members of the President’s personal cabinet.